TTIP talks: Food fights block EU–US trade deal | Hacker News Reader

TTIP talks: Food fights block EU–US trade deal

bbc.co.uk

16 pointschestnut-tree13 comments

Power to Europe. It alone has the might to stand up to the US corporatocracy. The precautionary principle, that stuff must be shown to be safe before being put on the market, makes a heck of a lot more sense than the American let-business-do-what-they-want approach.

Power to Europe in this case, though in general their Common Agricultural Policy is insanity

The Common Agricultural Policy has its upsides too. It's nice to know a lot of the produce is based of a certain baseline. Particularly when it comes to pesticides and GMO & allowing this to work in market through the use CAP

> The European Commission - the EU's top regulator - has given EU member states the power to ban GMO cultivation for reasons beyond environmental or public health concerns

This is insane, bans must be on environmental and health concerns only, not political ones like right now.

I think it is reasonable for a country to ban GMOs that are covered by patents that would be adverse to that country's agricultural industry.

There is also a lot of fear of the GM crops destroying our already great crops. We dont see any need to actually risk anything with crops that have been modified when we have perfectly great crops already.

> We dont see any need to actually risk anything with crops that have been modified when we have perfectly great crops already.

What risk? Can you provide ant source for that risk.

And, by the way, apart that we don't have perfectly great crops, those crops are already totally modified.

It seems the risk for Europe would be giving control of their agriculture to a non-EU corporation like Monsanto.

Really? Right now, there is a lot of crops patented and it is not happening.

Patenting has nothing to do with liking GMO or not, this is just an excuse

Crop patents are older than GMO, a lot of crops and seeds are patented. Do we have to ban them?

Food protectionism for political reasons is standard practice. It is part of ensuring national security. It makes perfect sense and it is not hard at all to understand why. Nothing insane about it.

There are also other valid concerns.

For instance GMO allows food producers to cheat costumers even more. GMO is advertised with reducing the need for pesticides, when often it's just the plants then that are producing the pesticides (BT-gene). Another common application is to let products look fresh longer while they're actually not fresh.

In the end we're living in democracies and have to take the opinion of the people into consideration. When a huge majority doesn't want GMO, then we shouldn't use them.

> In the end we're living in democracies and have to take the opinion of the people into consideration. When a huge majority doesn't want GMO, then we shouldn't use them.

Tell people to ban insuline and other GMO, people don't want GMO because of FUD

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